The quality of discourse for women today is poor. The many and varied reasons for this will make a post for another day, but for the moment, note that the Mommy Wars and hookup culture discussions might be heartfelt but rarely resolve anything.

Notable recent examples of unproductive chattering: Naomi Wolf has created a new range of vagina puns with her anecdotal account of her technicolor orgasms in her latest book Vagina. The Life of Julia is a left-looking faceless cartoon claiming that women need government to take care of them. (I linked to Iowahawk’s parody because the original is too depressing.) Hanna Rosin seeks to convince us that replacing domineering men with domineering women amounts to positive progress. And a fan fiction author addicted to “shouty capitals,” E.L. James, captured the imagination of women across the English-speaking world with a poor specimen of a bondage novel that has since spun off a line of sex toys with little Fifty Shades of Grey logo tags. (British comment threads are always informative. Why pay for trademarked logo pleasure balls when limes work just as well?)

Missing has been someone to show how absurd this all is. We, the most privileged and independent women in history, find those discussions compelling? Sure, the Right has been pointing out the absurdities in such discussions for a while, but we are written off as the bigoted and biased Other. Feminist thought needs some honest criticism from the inside.

Re-enter Camille Paglia, the “pro-sex, pro-porn, pro-art, pro-beauty, pro-pop” sixties feminist and heavily published art and culture critic, quiet for the past few years while writing her latest book due out on October 16th, Glittering Images: A Journey Through Art from Egypt to Star Wars. Our debates suffered from her absence.

I found many of the major U.S. reviews of Wolf’s book to be oddly naive in the way they forcefully critiqued her failures of research and reasoning and yet gullibly accepted everything she said about herself. They swallowed wholesale her tall tales of her fabulous sex life and didn’t seem to notice how viciously castrating to men the entire book is. And the reviewers revealed their own historical ignorance in their failure to call Wolf on her absurd portrayal of ancient vagina-worship—where it was brute procreation and never women’s pleasure that was being honored. …

Those chatty, snippy reviews revealed how watered down and banal feminist discourse has become in the decades since Freud was first rejected as sexist by second-wave feminists. … I was shocked at the grotesque sexual exhibitionism here of a woman who is turning 50 this year and who is the mother of two teenagers. Why would anyone do this to herself and her family? Shouldn’t it be obvious that anyone who is genuinely enjoying a wonderful love life would never expose those tender intimacies to the harsh spotlight of the world?

Paglia’s book is about art — all of it, not just the stuff deemed art by the coastal elites — but the range of issues she covered in that short Salon interview alone can spawn discussions ranging from the fate of publishing to protest voting for Green Party candidate Jill Stein to the “formidable and capable [homeschooling women driving the Tea Party] whom feminism has foolishly ignored.” In fact, Paglia wrote this book for those homeschooling moms.

I eagerly await Glittering Images in part because her commentary often reminds me of my favorite Calvin and Hobbes strips. Bill Watterson provided insightful cultural commentary and has been sorely missed since he retired the cartoon. I am also eager to read Paglia’s book because I get to dust and polish some old musings about the visual artistry of George Lucas. (Back when Star Wars fans were fighting pop despair about the dreadful prequels, we often clung to the visuals as a silver lining.) Mostly, however, I expect that Paglia will make us think and question conventional wisdom. She will inspire critical thinking that is long overdue.

Click this image to purchase a Calvin and Hobbes book.

Until the release, however, anyone unfamiliar with Paglia might wonder how an art critic from Philadelphia manages to affect our national conversations. Or, why does the Right respect Paglia while the Left tries to dismiss her as a mere provocateur?

Much of second- and third-wave Feminism clings either to the notion that women can and want to be like men or that there is no feminine or masculine nature. More broadly, much of modern liberalism relies on the fallacy that humans are essentially good, only corrupted by society. Paglia thinks this is nonsense on stilts. She believes that Nature exists, that it “indiscriminately exerts its force” on us.

She is not of the Right, because she disagrees on how to handle our dark nature — for example, Paglia would have society accept pornography as a release valve while conservatives typically would have us strive for self-control but both insist on confronting the darkness; to deny it, as the Left does, is naive and dangerous.

“Human beings are not nature’s favorites. We are merely one of a multitude of species upon which nature indiscriminately exerts its force.” This is the basis of her cultural criticism. She uses art as evidence. With Paglia on the interview circuit, women’s debates — and the rest of our cultural dialogues — should get more interesting again. They might even become productive.

45 Comments, 20 Threads

1.
Fail Burton

As for George Lucas’s vision – see: Ralph Mcquarrie.

On “indiscriminately exerts its force,” this is merely saying water is wet. Liberals do indeed deny this and find ways to call it discrimination and racism. In fact this is why history’s failures gather under the stupid blimp called the “Rainbow Coalition.”

Liberals believe in woulda, coulda, shoulda and I believe that Bolivia is the way it is because it is the way it is. Blaming someone for that, making excuses, or throwing Pizarro reparations to the amount of a quadrillion dollars will never change that.

Re: Ralph Mcquarrie, I know. I know. But Lucas is a pretty famous control freak. No one but the two of them knows how much one pushed the other, but yes, if one is going to praise Lucas’s visual artistry, Ralph should get his due. I suspect, however, that Paglia is going for all the visual imagery—costumes, symbols, cutting, mirror images—there is a lot there that even the 5+ hours of RedLetterMedia review didn’t cover.

Paglia’s writing since 2001, I’ll admit has been weaker. I’ve only seen a few bits from her in the past few years and was not impressed. That said, this new book looks promising. She might have gone of the rails, and if she has, the reviews will be brutal. We will know next week.

Yes, I did not mean to abandon hope in advance of seeing the book itself.

Paglia never could really give up on the Democratic party and liberal ethos as it seemed in the 1960s, she simply cannot bring herself to vote for a Romney even when the alternative is an Obama. That, I could understand. However she lets it feed back to positive views of Obama that I cannot imagine the Paglia of Sexual Personae ever entertaining, and lets it feed negative views of Romney or any Republicans that are simply not objective or real. Instead she throws her vote onto a Green party that is nine kinds of delusional. Paglia herself seems so lost, I don’t really expect the book to be coherent. The few sparkles of insight that she yet manages in her columns are only the sadder in such a mass of mess. Maybe the greater editorial process of a book will provide leverage to something like her old quality? Then again, what would you bet on it? Well, we’ll see soon enough.

I think Paglia was a brilliant writer on literature and the visual arts. Witty, keen, and insightful. Her taste in music never amounted to very much…

She completely crumpled after the 9/11/2001 WTC attack. I remember reading her first column, in the aftermath, dealing with outrage, where she tepidly stated that “We should pay more attention to Arab culture…re: art. I’m paraphrasing, and I agree that we ought to learn about other people, and belief systems, in order to understand what we are up against. That’s not what Paglie meant, though. Her weak tea was her befuddled reaction to the real world, devastating realization that the attack proved that EVERY social meme she ever supported, and trumpeted, was WRONG. The deranged, civilization-annihilating “Liberal” (Marxist) social polcies of the Sixties were WRONG.

Well she’s long since complained against the Marxist social policies of the 60′s. That’s one of the things fans like about her, she was willing to examine what she believed and adjust. I might think, and often do, that she’s still wrong but give her credit for being willing to question herself.
I’m plowing through the book today. Only through the intro and skimming of a few chapters, and I think she’s back on form. The barrenness of Marxist doctrine is taking a heavy hit, as is American education, primary to university. More on that soon.

Thanks for your reply. I’ll check out the book. Paglia was a BRILLIANT writer, and thinker. “Sexual Personae” had a profound influence on me. Her analysis and interpretation of Art, through the ages, is peerless. Her chapter on Spencer’s “The Fairie Queen” was a revelation, as was the FQ, itself. And no one but no one does a better analysis of Hitchcock, and Emily Dickinson.

If she’s “back” – huzzah! Perhaps she can dedicate her life to restoring respect and reverence for the glories -the unmatched glories, of Western Civilization.

“…….She is not of the Right because she disagrees on how to handle our dark nature — for example, Paglia would have society accept pornography as a release valve while conservatives typically would have us strive for self-control —but both insist on confronting the darkness; to deny it, as the Left does, is naive and dangerous………”

Actually, you need both. You also have to be a person of discipline and self-control who recognises the danger and chaos of the dark nature to even have pornography worthy of the name, or to understand what it is………

Camille Paglia is wrong, and also can be blasphemous and nasty in the way that only an lapsed Catholic can be. (Her book Sexual Personae is a good example of this.) But she also has a good strong dose of survival instinct and common sense, and she’s a genuine thinker with a fund of learning and a sense of perspective. So yes, she’s worth reading and arguing with.

I think it’s a very good insight that Paglia and conservatives accept the unperfectable, dark side of the human nature. She’s most certainly no doctrinaire and at the very least most of her writing is thought-provoking. I first discovered her writing on Salon in the 90s, and absolutely idolized her. I haven’t re-read any of her books, and I have a suspicion they feel dated. I found her commentary on contemporary culture most interesting (Sexual Personae — not so much; she should had listened to Harold Bloom and concentrated on a specific era, imho).
I doubt home-schooling moms have much use for her book, but it speaks volumes for Paglia that she admires them. I’m going to order the new book.

“Sexual Personae” is not dated; not unless Shakespeare, the brilliant achievements of classical (Caucasian)Ancient Egypt, and the cannon of materpieces of Western Art are “dated”.

Which they are not.

SP, in fect, is one of the very very few legitimate works of genuine scholarship that has emerged from the Marxist-defiled-and-corroded environs American Acadamy, in the 20th Century. Paglia, fyi, ought to have run away screaming from Bloom et al.

My comment was about Paglia as a whole, not any of her books. I think she’s a brilliant cultural critic, although SP is probably not the greatest text on art history. Paglia was the “it” intellectual of the 90s, but her way more than 15 minutes were up 10 years ago. She still has a lot to say.

I really enjoy Ms. Paglia’s writing as someone who once studied and made art and now is a homeschooling mom of four and college instructor. I don’t agree with her conclusions most of the time, but I’ve always admired her because there is truth in her observations. She describes abortion for what it is: murder. She may go on to make some kind of “nature is brutal” justification for why women should be able to murder the children in their wombs but unlike most that take that position she calls it like it is. Looking forward to the book.

One of our children’s very favorite books for an evening read-aloud was a 19th-children’s book called “The Peterkin Papers”. It depicts a goofy family whose members, who were educated within an inch of their lives, are incapable of finding the simple solution to a problem. For example, when they find that their Christmas tree is too tall to fit into their living room, their solution is to rebuild the house rather than trim the tree. Or, when Mrs Peterkin accidentally puts salt into her coffee, the family spends pages adding this substance and that to the coffee to try and fix its taste.

However, the Peterkins always find a solution because they have a friend, known only as “The Lady From Philadelphia”, to whom they bring their problems; and The Lady From Philadelphia always presents the common-sense solution. She’s the one who tells Mrs Peterkin to throw away her coffee and pour a fresh cup; and she’s the one who tells Mr Peterkin to saw a couple of feet off the bottom of the Christmas tree.

This, I think, is almost a perfect metaphor for Paglia and the feminists. The only difference is that the Peterkins at least at the wit to listen to their Lady From Philadelphia; while the feminists will either ignore or revile Paglia. How sad.

Outstanding, Brown Line. I’ll need to dig up that copy of the Peterkin Papers which was on my parents’ bookshelves.

Its interesting how a lot of conservative intellectuals are much more open than their counterparts on the Left to seriously considering a variety of points of view. In that sense, conservative scholars often do a better job of showing how the liberal arts should function than do those on the other side. Sometimes, we need to beware of overly embracing the enemy of our enemies. For example, in the world of punditry, many of us looked way too favorably upon Christopher Hitchens because he was witty, he attacked the Clintons, and he defended the Iraq War. But Leslie Loftis makes a key point about Paglia: Although I strongly disagree with those who favor or advocate pornography as Paglia does, I often find what she has to say worthwhile, especially because she recognizes the “dark” side of human nature.

On a tangent, I’m always harping on this, but I wish more conservatives would be “pro-art, pro-beauty,” as Paglia claims to be. When our side doesn’t significantly advocate for those concepts, the Left swarms into the breach and becomes dominant, as it did in public schools and academia when conservatives gave up paying enough attention to those areas. We don’t need to be pro-art in the sense of defending things like “P*ss-Chr*st” or government funding of PBS, but we should at least be more encouraging of younger conservatives who have an aptitude for the arts and humanities. Rush Limbaugh does a great job of advocating for the entrepreneur, but not everyone has the personality to be successful in business. And even if the USA became the entrepreneur’s dream once again, we would still be lacking a soul if we didn’t appreciate other areas such as the arts.

Egil, I agree with your point about conservatives neglecting the realm of art and beauty. We might start by reclaiming the Western Canon, as Harold Bloom advocated. The West’s literary, art and music treasures have been defamed and dismissed over the decades by unrelenting attacks from the left. Our universities force students to view the West’s rich heritage through the distorted lenses of cultural relativism, sexual politics and feminist theory. Just as the left did with political theory, it’s co-opted the arts and humanities and twisted them to its own ends, replacing beauty with ugliness masquerading as art and paving the way for abominations like P*** Christ.

One thing I’ve seen is that some feminists have no sense of naunce. For example, I remmeber reading about a comment that the Bible “justified” the rape of Tamar by Amnon. Now anyone above the age of ten who reads that story can see that it is written (and I read it in the original) to inspire horror in the reader as to what happened. (Not to mentaion the aftermath, which included a horrific civil war. And the way the Rabbis treated the story.) Yet because the prophet does not actually come and say “this is wrong” (something not that common in the book of Samuel), it is seen as justifying the act.

A person who has no sense of of naunce gets to publish literary commentary and have it taken seriously? OK I guess, as long as you have enough men with fake Chivalry backing you up.

Have you read Lineage of Grace? It is historical fiction about the five women named in the lineage of Christ at the beginning of the Book of Matthew. Interesting reading on Tamar, Rahab, Ruth, Bathsheba, and Mary.
As for feminist legal theory and rape—dreadful doctrine. I’ve got that woven into some drafts right now, specifically their reliance on expressed verbal consent.

think of how many 9 or 10 or 11 year old girls are being exposed to pornography in USA on the internet day after day after day and they end up in mental hospital after mental hospital after mental hospital because they do not know how to target their HAye as the Satan’s women know and do not wonder why a Saladin comes along and say let me pick a chosen wife at 6 and keep this girl safe from all the sexual perversion then give her 3 babies starting at 17 so she can enter a holy life dedicated to the True God at 21 as Babylon the great fall producing uncountable numbers of demons with state against state city and against city town against town street against street as the demonics fight for power and control over the “them” and it could be worse than that with no Cyrus but just the Great coming of THE ANTICHRIST to seize the day to unite them all back into Satan The Devil
s religion to defeat the “enemy”

dear waxwing: you have quite a way with the visuals. However, this is print. It’s easier to make sense of what you are writing if you use periods. A period marks off one idea, or, in your case, one image. Would you mind trying that, to see if it’s easier to make sense of your writings?

I only know of one other person who had to learn to write sentences as a grownup. It took her a few years to get the hang of it.

I have truly missed her voice the last 3 years. At this critical time in our history, I could not believe it when I went to read her column and she had bid us adieu to finish her book. I am a conservative woman who loves how she thinks. One of the best things about her, is she has common sense! So glad she is back.

I know. And Tom Wolfe is hitting the interview circuit and bookstores too which should re-open conversation over whether literature should be meaningful and relevant to the reader or merely beautiful. Between the two of them they can spark quite a bit of cultural critical thinking.

whether I agree with her or not, at least I know why. Paglia is not prone to keeping to a pre-determined orthodoxy, spouting the agreed-upon talking points, and being as predictable as the next appearance of your favorite pundit. I like someone who brings a different look to things, someone whose words don’t sound rehearsed, and someone not afraid to challenge whatever the conventional wisdom is.

You don’t have to agree with Paglia to enjoy her; in fact, it often helps not to. But having your belief system challenged is a worthwhile exercise in this medium-to-confirm-any-point-of-view society.

One can argue with Paglia, which is as it should be. She has reasons for what she thinks, and why she thinks them. They may be stupid or insightful, but what liberal today is even willing to put their stupid ideas to the test?
Ms. Paglia may be wrong in her conclusions, but not so wrong as to be discarded. She comes up with some great thinking from time to time, and has a trait that most libs lack: she wants you to have more freedom, to try more things, to act as you wish.
Today’s libs are mere Nazis. DO WHAT WE SAY, or ELSE!

“I was shocked at the grotesque sexual exhibitionism here of a woman who is turning 50 this year and who is the mother of two teenagers. Why would anyone do this to herself and her family?”

What have you done with the real Camille, you poser? I think if you look in her basement you’ll find a pod. I mean, this is like Madonna getting pissed of at Lady Gaga for being an exhibitionist. “Transgressive” sexual exhibitionism for the purpose of shocking the bourgeoisie is Paglia’s stock-in-trade. Or used to be anyway. But it looks like she’s turned into the Church Lady in her sensescence.

Seriously, though, I can’t believe anyone could take Paglia seriously. I switched her off back when she basically blamed the “Elephant Dung Mdonna” (which was done by a Catholic artist) on the Jews who she said ran the museum in which it was exhibited, saying it offended her as a Catholic.

I mean, the woman is a Pope-hating lesbian with a leather and S&M fetish. And she’s accusing the Jews of insulting Catholicism? It takes a mind-bending brand of self-absorption for a person like her to say something like that.

““Transgressive” sexual exhibitionism for the purpose of shocking the bourgeoisie is Paglia’s stock-in-trade.”
No, it isn’t. Shock value is one of her many…let’s be kind and call them pet peeves. The argument is in the intro. The quest for shock value has killed modern art in America. As far as the singers, she has savaged Lady Gaga for being an exhibitionist, so over the top in trying to copy Madonna, who was breaking new ground, that Gaga is asexual. I think they were both over the top, to exposed to be sensual, and that Madonna’s refusal to evolve into her age—the super skinny frame, those spike boots at the Super Bowl halftime that she had to move so cautiously while wearing made her look old and awkward—has made her even more asexual. Regardless, Paglia is not an advocate of shock value.

I don’t really care about Madonna or Lady Gaga, or what Paglia thinks of them. I was using them for purposes of comparison only, like a metaphor or an analogy. I think it’s funny when somebody like Paglia accuses someone like Wolf of being a sexual exhibitionist, which to me is like Madonna accusing Lady Gaga of being an exhibitionist. All Paglia talks about is sex, essentially, so it’s funny when she goes all school-marmish and gets the “what about the children?” vapors. I would have preferred to hear why Paglia thinks Wolf’s obsession with her own lady bits is wrong, or badly done, or incorrect from a scholarly point of view, or something. Just getting scandalized by it seems out of character.

In a column in Salon, she criticized the Jews on the museum board for allowing the Dung Madonna to be displayed, saying that it showed Jewish disrespect for Catholicism. She was essentially advocating censorship because she thought the piece, by a Catholic artist, insulted Catholicism, and that the Jews involved in the museum administration bore responsibility for it. If you search the Salon archives you should be able to find the article.

I don’t think praising Arab culture necessarily makes one an anti-Semite, but Paglia is all about the tingle. If something excites her, it is deemed Good. To Paglia, the Arabs are romantic: you know, warriros from the desert, 1,001 Arabian Nights, dazzling empires, and all that. The Jews, sequestered away in their study halls with their dusty Talmuds, just don’t have the thrill factor for her.

She’s an incredibly shoddy ansd scattershot thinker, though. But like I said, her outrageousness is fun to watch.

She’s not an anti-Semite, but she doesn’t get Jewish. I remember the essay you mentioned. It’s a bit silly to blame people for allowing certain installments to be displayed. I’m sure the curators didn’t beg for Catholic-bashing art, but it’s a staple these days, given how much of the art today is done by lapsed Catholics. There is much self-hating Jewish art, too, championed mainly by Jews, so there you go.
I also recall a column of hers where she talked of a professor she had as an undergrad who pointed at a Jewish student and said “He looks like young David”. Paglia was all excited about connection to Jewish antiquity [that the Jewish people had in the 60s and 70s]. That’s her take on Jewishness.
She also had another column where she talked of always having some sort of a Jewish girl wiping her nose with toilet paper in her class because she is somehow always sick and always unprepared for her runny nose, and basically begging for attention. And there is always that girl in her class, allegedly. If she’s trying to say that many Jewish girls are spoiled rotten, and that Jewish moms need to stop rewarding their children for being sick… I dono. That was 20 years ago. Probably sort of true, sometimes, almost… but I never had that Jewish girl in my classes. But, well, that’s Paglia for you. She’s very visual and she’s overstating. And it’s all pretty innocent, and I don’t think it feeds into some kind of larger anti-Semitic momentum.
I still admire her persona.